The second part of the Cannes Festival is turning out to be more challenging, quality-wise, than the first where “Ma Loute” and “Mal de Pierres,” an off-kilter comedy and a love drama respectively, were easy to stamp as good cinema. Week two, on the other hand, isn’t all gems. Yesterday, the Dardenne Brothers’s “La fille inconnue” (“The Unknown Girl”) received a lukewarm response. It's a drama about a young woman doctor who, overcome

“Personal Shopper” by Olivier Assayas is a movie about ghosts, the ghost that Maureen (played by Kristen Stewart) works for as personal shopper and that of her dead brother Lewis, whom she is trying to reconnect with. Kyra Gellman (Nora von Waldstätten) is an international socialite who needs her wardrobe constantly augmented, so she hired Maureen to regularly

PARIS, this morning - One tweet. That’s all I could manage to send from the Cannes Festival’s press conference, the yearly event before-the-event held in a large movie theater at the top of the Champs Elysées. The network (wifi or cellular) quickly crashed, enveloping the event in a blanket of secrecy. After the conference I rushed into a bar nearby so that I could order myself a 7 euro-bottle of water with fizz and do some work.

Real-life Carlos, a Venezuelan citizen and a convert to Islam, has said: "From now on terrorism is going to be more or less a daily part of the landscape of your rotting democracies." Whatever shadows lingered in my mind about his life before seeing “Carlos” still exist tonight. To me, people like Carlos are first and foremost products of the era they were born in, with the particularity that people like Carlos had a utopic bent to boot and a family background that would naturally orient him towards political activism. And yet, none of this begins to explain why Carlos became Carlos.